Do you know where all of your company’s AWS costs are coming from?

With AWS tags and Cloudability, you can quickly split out your AWS spending by cost centers like department, product or client.

In this video, our Head of Product, Toban Zolman, shows you how to:

- Segment and manage your AWS spending using AWS tags.
- Track daily changes and trends in your AWS spending and usage.
- Identify opportunities to save money with Reserved Instances.

Watch the video then sign up for a free Cloudability trial and see how easy AWS cost management can be.

Is your team still using giant spreadsheets to segment and report AWS spending for your finance and management teams?

See how Cloudability’s AWS Cost Analytics tool lets you create detailed AWS spending reports in just minutes using detailed billing data and tags from across all of your AWS accounts.

Sign up now for this free, 30-minute webinar and learn how to:

• Use AWS tags to tie AWS spending to your own internal cost centers.
• Track daily changes trends in your AWS spending and usage.
• Identify opportunities to save money with Reserved Instances.

After the lesson, stick around for an open Q&A where you can bring your own cloud management questions and issues.

Register today and see how easy it can be to manage your AWS spending.

We’re thrilled to announce that Cloudability was selected last night as “Startup of the Year” at the 2013 Oregon Technology Awards, hosted by the Technology Association of Oregon at the Portland Art Museum. We want to thank everyone at the TAO as well as all of our supporters around Oregon and the world.

While it’s always great to see our name in lights and our team’s hard work recognized, these kind of events also underline the strength and vibrancy of the technology industry in Oregon.

Looking around us at the awards ceremony, we saw other startups like OpenSesame and Vendscreen alongside “Rising Star” companies such as PuppetLabs, Janrain and Elemental Technologies. We’re humbled and honored to be considered part of a group consisting of strong players like these.

If you haven’t already done so, check out all of this year’s winners. You can also find out more about the TAO’s work at their website, along with details about the other events TAO holds through the year.

Today Cloudability is launching our newest product: AWS Cost Analytics.

When Cloudability introduced our EC2 Usage Analytics tool at the end of last year, it was a watershed moment for many of our users. For the first time, they had the tools they needed to really make sense of instance-level EC2 usage trends.

Since then, thousands of users have leveraged this data to increase the efficiency of their AWS usage by shutting down unused instances, downgrading and consolidating underutilized instances, and converting heavily used instances to Reserved Instances.

We’ve now applied our analytics experience to invoice costs to introduce AWS Cost Analytics. The enabling data for this new product are detailed billing files recently introduced by AWS via programmatic access. These files are stored on an S3 bucket of your choosing in CSV format.

Depending on the size of your infrastructure, each of these detailed billing files can be gigabytes in size and contain tens of thousands of rows. The data is rich, but translating data to information is a challenge for even the savviest spreadsheet guru.

Cloudability’s new AWS Cost Analytics leverages our proven analytics feature set to drive a new level of visibility into costs across all of your AWS products.

Read the rest of this entry »

Cloudability’s dashboard and email are daily touchpoint for thousands of our users. It provides an at-a-glance view of what you’ve spent so far in the month, what you’re estimated to spend and whether it’s more or less than last month.

But, as cloud users have gotten more sophisticated, we’ve gotten consistent requests to go deeper with our daily email and dashboard KPI’s. Specifically, users want to know:

• How does my month-to-date spending compare to last month at this same time?
• What’s my rolling average and how is it trending day-over-day?
• How has my spending changed in the last 24 hours?
• What specifically is causing changes in my spending trends?

With those questions in mind, we are updating your daily email reports and dashboard with new KPI’s and new options to let you customize your spending predictions to suit your situation. The improvements will go live on April 23.

Improved Spending Estimates

We started at the ground up by analyzing spending patterns across all of our users and have improved our prediction algorithm by adjusting how we weight historical spend and process spending spikes. The result is monthly estimates that are 20% more accurate than our prior statistical model.

We’ve also learned from our analysis of customer data and feedback from users that there are certain scenarios where it makes sense to use a rolling average rather than our standard algorithm to estimate monthly spend.

This is especially true for customers increasing spend very rapidly – the rolling average can be based on a shorter time period such as three days. Or customers that have had a large spending spike – our standard algorithm can be slow to adjust estimates downward on this and predictions can be skewed higher. A rolling average can be set to a length of time that excludes the spending spike.

In Preferences you can now select either the standard algorithm or a rolling average. When selecting a rolling average you can also define the number of days from 1 to 90. This gives you the control to set the horizon for spending trends.

We’re excited about this addition as it gives customers significantly more control over their estimates and also automates generating rolling averages – a process that many people were doing manually in the past.

Monthly-to-date Comparisons

We’ve always shown your month to date spend, but we now compare that to your spend on this date last month so that you can see a direct comparison month over month.

This comparison will let you know if your month-over-month spending is trending up or down.

New KPI’s

We’ve also introduced three new KPI areas directly below your monthly spend. The first is your estimated spend for the current month. This estimate is based on the algorithm and time period that you select in User Preferences.

You’ll see both your estimate for the month and your total spend for the previous month. We also indicate if the spend is increasing or decreasing and the percentage of estimated change from the prior month.

This data was available before, but we changed how we package the information together to make understanding trends clearer.

Daily Rolling Average Comparison

Next we are displaying a trailing rolling average below the monthly estimate. This will default to a 7-day rolling average unless you’ve defined a different number of days in user preferences. As with the estimate for the current month we display the rolling average number, the previous day’s rolling average over the same period and indicate the percentage change.

The trailing rolling average can give trending context to your spend and help you determine if spending is trending up or down even before it greatly affects monthly estimates.

Change from yesterday

Finally, we are now presenting Yesterday’s spend as a discrete KPI with a comparison to the previous day’s spend. This was a common request to see exactly what has happened in the last 24 hours.

This is most useful for catching new resources that may have been unexpectedly spun up in the last day.

Easier cloud spending management

Together these updates will help you understand the story of your spending trends.

You can see what you’ve actually spent, what we think you’ll spend by the end of the month and then see if you are trending up or down and by how much and what happened yesterday.

If you still have questions as to the cause you can scroll down and see for each account and service the percentage change from the prior month. If you are an AWS user you can also see changes in utilization hours and instance count from the prior day.